'The End of Men' will start conversations
With women acknowledged as a key battleground in the presidential election, it's especially timely that a book entitled The End of Men: And The Rise of Women has emerged.
It's not nearly as black and white as the incendiary title suggests, but author Hanna Rosin has a way with titles and chapter headings (one is entitled The Middle Class Gets a Sex Change).
Based on her July 2010 magazine article in The Atlantic, Rosin has dug deeper in an effort to show the ascendancy of women.
While her points are valid and bolstered anecdotally, her book sometimes feels like a long-form, and somewhat padded, version of her original essay.
It's nonetheless an ambitious undertaking, as Rosin looks at a variety of arenas — work, marriage, child-rearing, sexual mores, education, even crime — that have changed radically for women.
If Rosin has an overriding thesis, it's the need to adapt to a changing landscape, something that women have been able to do with greater nimbleness than men. Rosin comes with up with the notions of Plastic Woman — implying they are flexible and adaptable — and Cardboard Man — rigid and unbending.
This is generally a readable exploration of how gender roles have evolved. Pop culture references are interwoven with literary allusions and statements from business professors, sociologists and anthropologists.
For the most part, this blend works, as Rosin has her finger squarely on the pulse of contemporary culture, despite her propensity for sweeping pronouncements, generalizations and repetition.
Still, Rosin makes several salient points worth exploring.
The recent recession has been harder on men. More women than men are attending and graduating from college. More middle-class women are foregoing marriage, though not necessarily childbearing. Young women are as comfortable with hook-ups as young men. Divorce is no longer as hard on women economically as it once was.
Not all her anecdotes cogently illustrate her points and her statistical evidence is often vague, particularly when tinged with hyperbole.
"For the 70 percent of Americans without a college degree the rise of the breadwinner wife is associated with the destruction of marriage," she says.
But the notion that education and class play a part in marriage stability is nonetheless intriguing.
"Divorce rates began to plummet for the college educated while they stayed high for everyone else," Rosin states.
While that's a valid point, she takes it further: "These days the establishment is being marshaled to confirm our new cultural notion that men have become the frail dependents in need of a protector. That men need marriage more than women do. In fact, they need it to survive."
It's a fascinating argument and may very well be true, but where is the statistical evidence to back up such a strong assertion?
Some sections are fresh and compelling. She finds an unlikely "feminist paradise" in the Deep South college town of Auburn, Ala., where the median income of the women is about 140% of the median income of the men.
She comes up with a smart analogy for a couple she interviews in Wisconsin: Hannah, a student in pharmacy school and her boyfriend, Billy, a sometimes painter.
"Women like Hannah reminded me of immigrants like my parents," Rosin writes. "Hannah seemed determined and unstoppable….as all the women she knew kept swimming upstream and the men got caught in the eddies; when the men became the equivalent of the family left behind in the Old Country, beloved maybe, but inert and frustratingly stuck in the past."
Rosin begins and ends her book with Calvin, a working-class man she interviewed whose girlfriend wouldn't let him spend much time with the daughter he'd fathered until he could man up and get a good job. By the end, he's adapted to the feminization of the working world and decided to go into nursing.
Rosin is at her best when acknowledging the complexity of current trends.
"If he had started out as my muse for the 'end of men,' Calvin was now showing that 'end' might not be a permanent state of existence."